Aug 03
I’ve got an hour to kill while my car is at the mechanic so I figured I’d try writing a full post from my iPhone via the Wordpress application. In these first two sentances alone I’m already noticing a few complications.
The first issue I’m running into is that although I’ve grown fairly compfortable typing using the iPhone’s vertical on screen keyboard, I’d much prefer the horizontal counterpart (which I’ve only seen in the browser so far). The second problem plaguing me is related to typing in a mobile device in general. I’m catching myself ommitting punctuation, and when I want to correct the ommission or I do remember to add the punctuation, it takes several key presses and at least one alternate screen to enter the punctuation. These aren’t major flaws, and I think they are certainly acceptable given the trade off is the ability to write a full featured article on a mobile device.
While I enjoy the conveniance of being able to write entire posts from my phone, I imagine the most practical use is for either correcting errors on or updating an existing post, or liveblogging.
Aug 02
For the past several months I’ve been going back and forth installing, configuring, and uninstalling various frameworks, blogging platforms, and content management systems, all with the goal of setting up a site to house my portfolio, blog, and resume. I’ve finally decided to stick with Wordpress and it seemed appropriate for my first official post to rehash the steps I took to arrive here.
Initially, I was planning to work with an MVC framework, more specifically CakePHP, which I had seen used to build a custom blog platform by Jonathan Snook. I began building a simple structure in CakePHP, all the while researching alternative frameworks. I eventually came to a point where I felt that CakePHP was trying to introduce a bit too much of its “automagic” functionality and I didn’t have control over certain aspects of my web application (Looking back now I imagine that this was probably due to my lack of experience with CakePHP. If I had taken the time to dig around I’m sure I could have circumvented or integrated CakePHP into whatever it was I was trying to accomplish).
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